Killing ourselves in Afghanistan

In a secret meeting with a Taliban commander, I learned how Bush administration aid to Pakistan helps fund insurgents who kill U.S. troops.

Editor's note: Research support was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

By Matthew Cole

Read more: Politics, Afghanistan, News, Kashmir, Pakistan, Taliban, CIA, Pervez Musharraf, al-qaida, Al Qaeda

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A Pakistan army garrison in Chitral. Insurgents were driven to this outpost in Pakistan army trucks like the one shown, given weapons, and then sent across the border into Afghanistan to attack U.S. targets.

March 10, 2008 | KABUL, Afghanistan -- On a recent bitterly cold winter day, I sat huddled on a red Persian carpet in an unheated Kabul office, waiting for a visitor who, I was told by a trusted friend, would help me understand why America is not winning its war in Afghanistan.

A stocky, bearded figure in a gray vest, a faded brown shalwar kameez and a cream-colored Pashtun shawl appeared at the door. He removed his shoes and walked on cracked, callused feet over the carpet to sit cross-legged beside me. Our meeting was conducted in secrecy. My guest was, until early 2007, a Taliban commander of 50 fighters in North Waziristan, Pakistan, one of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) near the Afghan border where both al-Qaida and Taliban insurgents operate. Ever since he left the Taliban, he has been living in fear of assassination for treason. I thanked him in English for his willingness to meet, and he answered me in Pashto, the chief language of southern and eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan's Tribal Areas, without a trace of emotion.

"If you had tried to interview me this time last year," he said, "I would have killed you." Then he reached past my feet and poured himself a glass of sugary green tea.

Over the course of several hours in the Kabul office, "Haji Muhammed," as we agreed he would be called, spun a gemstone ring absently around his finger and ran his hands through his thinning hair as he described for me his firsthand experience of an American foreign-policy debacle. The U.S. is paying for both sides of the war in Afghanistan. As is becoming increasingly clear, for at least two and a half years, and perhaps far longer, the Pakistani government has been receiving massive U.S. aid while its intelligence agency and elements of its military have been pursuing their own anti-American agenda within Afghanistan. The U.S. has given the Musharraf regime $10 billion since Sept. 11, 2001, but Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and factions within the Pakistan army, while helping the U.S. track al-Qaida with one hand, have been aiding the Taliban with the other, both inside Afghanistan and across the Pakistani border in Tribal Areas like North Waziristan. In part because of Pakistani help, the Taliban have made a steady comeback and American and Afghan casualties are at their highest annual levels since the war began.

Islamabad has denied complicity and Washington has maintained official silence, but the double-dealing is not surprising. It's just the continuation of the Pakistani government's former alliance with the Taliban, which was itself an outgrowth of a decades-old Pakistani policy of trying to exert control over the internal affairs of its chaotic neighbor. It was the recognition of Pakistan's motives that drove Muhammed to defect. "I left the Taliban because I could no longer stand Pakistan's hand in Afghanistan," Muhammed told me through a translator. "For years we were trained and helped, and fought alongside ISI and [Pakistan] army officers. But they are not mujahedin, they want to keep Afghanistan weak."

Muhammed said the ISI had helped train and arm him to fight inside Afghanistan against U.S. and international coalition forces since 2002. "If the world can know what happens inside the Tribal Areas, maybe Afghanistan has a chance to survive," he said. "Like this the war will not end."

For nearly two years now, the military situation inside Afghanistan has deteriorated. Violence has increased, security has shrunk and the Taliban have brought the war to Kabul. Coalition casualties increased more than 20 percent last year and estimates of civilian deaths for 2007 range as high as 6,000. My own repeated trips to the country have convinced me that not only are Haji Muhammed's assertions about Pakistan's role in the violence true, but that the U.S. -- or at least its representatives on the ground in Afghanistan -- has long been aware of the problem.

Interviews with Afghan and U.S. intelligence officials involved in covert U.S. operations along the border suggest that U.S. intelligence operatives have known since 2005 that the Pakistan army and the ISI have been training and arming insurgents in the Tribal Areas who cross into Afghanistan to kill Afghan, U.S. and coalition forces. "Our guys are getting killed because Pakistan has a double policy," said an American policy advisor who travels frequently to U.S military and CIA bases near the border. But the same advisor says intelligence officials have only recently gotten through to their superiors in Washington that Pakistan is part of the problem.

On my own trip to an American military base near the border in Afghanistan's Kunar province in October 2006, I was asked on arrival to have an off-the-record conversation with a U.S. Army public affairs officer. He explained a few rules about avoiding sections of the base that were run by the CIA and Special Forces. Then he told me that although we could literally see Pakistan from where we stood, I should ask no questions about what role Pakistan played in Afghanistan's war. "You might as well pretend it doesn't exist," he said. He understood reporters were interested, and acknowledged that most of the insurgents operating in Kunar were based across the border in Pakistan. But the Army's orders were, essentially, to ignore the problem. "Pakistan," he said, smiling, "is a committed ally in the war on terror."

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The sweet tea could not keep us warm, so our host brought in an electric space heater. I listened as Muhammed detailed Pakistani help in attacking U.S. forces in Afghanistan. While it is impossible to verify all of his claims, parts of his story have been confirmed by a senior Western diplomat and Afghan and U.S. intelligence officials.

Muhammed is a Pashtun Afghan who joined the Taliban as a young fighter in 1993. He viewed the Taliban, which would rule Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, as a principled force bringing needed national stability. He fought against the Taliban's main rivals, the Northern Alliance, who would become instrumental in the American effort to roust the Taliban after 9/11.

The U.S. began bombing Taliban and al-Qaida sites in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, when the Taliban would not hand over Osama bin Laden. The aerial campaign was meant to support the Northern Alliance's push against the Taliban. After Kabul fell to the Northern Alliance and U.S. Special Forces in November, Muhammad retreated with other Taliban fighters across the border, to Miran Shah in North Waziristan, one of the southernmost of Pakistan's Tribal Areas.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are a collection of seven "agencies" and six "frontier districts" that share 250 miles of mountainous border with Afghanistan, and make up an area about the size of Massachusetts. Nearly all of the 4 million residents are Pashtun, like their neighbors across the border in southern and eastern Afghanistan. The arid, craggy region is less Pakistan than it is "Pashtunistan," an area run by millennia-old tribal customs rather than the central government in Islamabad. Since U.S. forces occupied Afghanistan and the anti-American insurgency began, the Tribal Areas have been headquarters for al-Qaida, and a refuge for the Taliban. The region has also been the site of most of the conflict's guerrilla and terrorist training camps, many of which Haji Muhammed attended, visited or helped conduct. Many of the worst terrorist incidents of recent years, the 7/7 suicide bombings in London, the failed Heathrow airline attacks, the German attacks and the recent train bombing attempts in Barcelona, involve individuals with significant ties to the Tribal Areas.

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